Australia brings back another 650 people from Afghanistan

CANBERRA: Australia has brought back another 650 people from Afghanistan in its biggest evacuation mission from the country to date. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said four Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and one New Zealand Air Force flights managed to land in Kabul and evacuated hundreds more people in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

It took the total number of people evacuated from Afghanistan by Australia and New Zealand to nearly 1,700. "It was our biggest night," Morrison told Nine Network TV. Morrison warned that the situation at the Kabul airport remained unpredictable and that any flight out of Afghanistan could be the last.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported on Tuesday that more than 50 Afghan athletes and their dependents, including Afghanistan's first-ever female Paralympian Zakia Khudadadi, were among the people evacuated from Kabul by Australia and New Zealand.

But crowds continued to mass outside the airport, with Afghans terrified of facing life under the Taliban.

Many fear a repeat of the brutal interpretation of sharia law that the Taliban implemented when first in power from 1996-2001, or retribution for working with the US-backed government over the past two decades. "The Taliban are the same as they were 20 years ago," Nilofar Bayat, a women's rights activist and former captain of Afghanistan's wheelchair basketball, said after fleeing and arriving in Spain. "If you see Afghanistan now, it's all men, there are no women because they don't accept woman as part of society."